1998: Start of construction of the Koralm Railway
2008: Start of construction of the Koralm Tunnel
2018: Breakthrough Koralm Tunnel
2020: Final Koralm tunnel breakthrough
2025: This announcement (https://orf.at/stories/3414173/ in German)
https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railwa...
Seems software neckbeards on HN are equally as guilty of underestimating the difficulty of other people's work like the managers they complain about.
Seems like a great project outcome. Mostly within budget, no political chaos due to delays (AFAICT) and allowing several months for testing before announcing it open.
I'd be a bit nervous, going through a long tunnel, in a region known for vulcanism and earthquakes.
You don't hear that much about great engineering projects today, yet it's still an incredible feat to build those.
At first that's a really odd sounding choice to this Hoosier. Turns out it's 1/3 of standard 50 Hz in Europe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_kV_AC_railway_electrificati...
My high school physics is not sufficient to really understand it.
Here's a great engineering project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_test_tunnel
The only options to get around was the expensive train system - and anyone I asked was bewildered why I would want to take a bus.. Maybe next time I should look in to carpooling or some other options. How do low income people get around typically? I need to go to attend a conference, but it's not cheap coming from Asia
EDIT: Seems I was wrong! Sorry. There are buses, (maybe fewer than other countries?)
There are various discount membership plans available that sometimes pay for themselves after just one round-trip or even one-way ride, and on the most popular connections there's now a private operator competing with the state-owned railway.
A yearly flat-rate ticket for intercity trains is also relatively affordable for EUR 1400 per year.
Thank you for the info!
Not always true. The Graz-Vienna(Airport) trip is often quicker by flixbus than by OBB train.
Trains in Austria are quite slow , often travelling at the same speed as cars on the highway or often times even slower.
Rail service is funded at the federal level, so there's less arguing about who pays for what. Bus service, however, is managed by regional transport associations funded by the provinces. This creates disincentives for cross-province bus routes because no single province wants to pay more than its 'fair' share for a service that primarily benefits voters in another province.
Similar dynamics play out at the city/province level. Take Linz, the provincial capital of Upper Austria: the city has had a social democratic (SPÖ) mayor continuously since 1945, while the province has had a conservative (ÖVP) governor for exactly the same period of 80 years. This disincentivizes the province government from helping to fund public transport within or into the city, because it's a win for social democratic city voters, while the more conservative rural voters would rather take the car anyway since they often can't do the whole trip by public transport.
Arguably the reason for the excellent public transport in the city of Vienna is that they are also their own province. Their mayor/governor, who has been a social democrat as well for the last 80 years, always controls both levels of funding.
can be cheap when you book early. Vienna -> Graz -> Vienna: ~20€
And talking about apples/oranges, let me add apples/bananas: Vienna to Budapest by train cost a lot when booking via öbb. And not a lot when booking via Regiojet.
The problem is the offers are all scattered around imho.
Prices are good only if you use it regularly as a commuter via a yearly subscription (Klimaticket), but for one off trips, prices are more expensive than flying.
Small county with small market monopolized by few politically connected local players in every major sector of the economy who sometimes enjoy regulatory protectionism from the government to keep foreign competitors out and turn a blind eye on racketeering practices.
That's how everything, including stuff made in Austria is more expensive than the same stuff sold in Germany even though wages are lower.
Same issues like in other small markets like New Zeeland except Austria being an EU member should have more pressure from free trade competition but that doesn't always work in favor of the consumers.
https://www.der-postillon.com/2012/08/neue-zeitform-futur-ii...
Note that I have no confidence Colorado will tackle the issues driving costs up. Several of the known factors are places where politically powerful people (from all sides so don't bring in class warfare) are increasing costs and they let you cut them off. There are a lot of unkonwen issues left after factoring the above, and it is likely they also have politically powerful people increasing costs.
Federal non-defense spending in the US is as high as ever (ignoring the brief COVID spike) https://www.cato.org/blog/century-federal-spending-1925-2025
The i70 line will never happen.
My favorite from this part of Europe is the Bernina Express across the alps from Switzerland to Italy.
Definetly worth a slow tv watch if you love trains. (e.g. https://youtu.be/Mw9qiV7XlFs )
... it looks like a multi-multi-multi-phase project. Hats off to making this work.
Second, I noticed how long it took to build this tunnel: Koralm Tunnel -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel
It is 33km, and it took from 2008 to 2025 to build it. That is a damn long time! The Toei Oedo line in Tokyo is 40+km and was built in about 10 years. My guess about the wild difference: The geoengineering of the Koralm Tunnel is way more complex, and/or the rock is much harder. Can anyone with experience in this area comment? I would like to learn more. I guess that most of central Tokyo is aluvial plains (Shanghai is similar), so you are basically digging through clay and sand -- easy stuff for modern tunnel boring machines.
Being two separate tunnels, it also needs twice as much excavation work. It's also ~25x deeper than Toei Oedo (4000ft vs 157ft). At 4000ft the rock itself is 45-50C!
> "The undisturbed rock temperature varies from 10 °C, in tunnel sections close to the portals, to 32 °C in the tunnel centre"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088677982...
Overall an amazing achievement, and unsurprising it took this long to figure out!
> Being two separate tunnels, it also needs twice as much excavation work.
Population size, density, terrain, etc. have nothing to do with it.
Kanto is flat, it's the only region in Japan that could sustain feeding such a massive population and could allow building the first mega city on the planet.
Combine that with the massive engineering and rail experience Japanese have, and it's no surprise imho that combined with favorable geography they could build it quickly.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Topograp...
https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000299789/traum-vom-sue...
https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railwa...
How is there no unifying design language for these?
Also, the EU is the most efficient government in terms of overhead, and having seen some of it up close not wasting time or money on "unifying design languages" for every single funding billboard is very much EU style. Just copy-paste by some local authority in Powerpoint in most cases, I bet.
1: https://hadea.ec.europa.eu/programmes/connecting-europe-faci...
2: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/3192a0ef-6bda...
3: https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/information-sources/log...
As a native US English speaker, I would probably write something like "Austria opens the world's sixth longest railway tunnel: 27 year long project arrives on schedule and under budget."
That's a long headline, though.
>> A CBC Toronto reporter rode the entire 10.3-kilometre line from east to west Monday morning, finding it took roughly 55 minutes to complete. As a reference point, over 400 runners ran this year's Toronto Marathon 10-kilometre event in under 55 minutes
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/finch-west-lrt-first-...
> "Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important."
> "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize"
That’s incredible! The project managers and contractors should collaborate on a book about how they did it. Heh staying on budget should be the norm and not the exception but irl a 20 year large infra project coming in that close is something to celebrate and learn from.
Which also begs the question; why is a railway project page on HN at all, regardless of anything else?
https://infrastruktur.oebb.at/en/projects-for-austria/railwa...
There aren't any big mountains between Graz and Klagenfurt. It's an hour on the Autobahn. That it took three hours by train... well, they just had shitty railroad? Best of luck, Southern neighbors!
I think this explains a lot. Adding a couple of stops adds a lot of time to the total!
The terrain is just hard railroad had do huge detour on this section
Look at map: https://mapy.com/en/turisticka?x=15.0703419&y=46.7076432&z=1...
Passes in those mountains are only ~1200m above valley level (~1650 abs). Yeah, perfectly ok to run railroad there.
Your autobahn climbs 600m on this section (to 1050m absolute) - it's way to high for railway to be effective.
